You want to know about Dana Hunter, then, do you? I'm a science blogger, SF writer, compleat geology addict, Gnu Atheist, and owner of a - excuse me, owned by a homicidal felid. I loves me some Doctor Who and Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers. Sums me up. I'm a Midwest-born Southwesterner transplanted to the Pacific Northwest, which should explain some personality quirks, the tendency to sprinkle Spanish around, and why I'll subject you to some real jawbreakers in the place names department. My cobloggers, Karen Locke, Jacob and Steamforged, and I are delighted to be your cantineras y cantinero. Join us for una tequila. And feel free to follow @dhunterauthor on Twitter. Salud!

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EVENTS

I Return Bearing Cats

Well, that break lasted longer than expected. Pockets. You can never have too many pockets. And zippers. Still working on it, but it’s time to get back to writing. Thank you for waiting patiently. In return, I have brought you kittehs.

One of the crafty little projects I’ve engaged in this week is kitty toys. I combined feathers and string and bells into creations certain to delight felids of all ages. Well, except for 18 year-old esplode-a-kitties who look upon your efforts with utmost disdain. Misha isn’t a fan of bells, it would seem. No matter. Luna is. Luna leapt upon the couch as I sat down to begin, dove into the feathers, batted the string, rang a few bells, and generally went into contortions of excitement. She could hardly believe her evening had been filled with delights beyond the fondest kittenhood dreams. Eventually, she settled beside the bag of feathers, watching rapt as I finished her new toy. Then we wrapped the string around a chair arm and let her have her way with it.

Luna with her fabulous new toy.

That expression is so worth the less than ten minutes of effort it takes to make one of these. And so far, Kirby hasn’t destroyed it, which is a new record for cat toys with feathers. Perhaps he appreciates hand-made things.

(These are super-easy to make. If you want to learn how, I’ll have B shoot a video next time I’m doing it. We have lots of kittehs to make toys for, and Starspider has just discovered the joys of felting, which means we’ll soon have catnip-filled felt toys to attach. I figure Misha will get over her disdain for bells if we give her enough kitty crack.)

Later, we’d gone downstairs to finish off some fights. Kirby was apparently conked after a long day’s adventuring. He took a long nap in his kitty bed, then made it about four feet before falling asleep in his Superman pose.

Super-sleeping.

Now, of course, sleeping in the same house as a kitten is fraught with danger. Luna crept up on him from behind and woke him up rather rudely by pouncing in a vampiric fashion.

Gotcha!

Poor Kirby. His life has gotten a lot less cushy since his sister came home.

But you’d forgive her anything, of course, because she’s a kitten and therefore bloody adorable. She’s taken to running all over the house with another of her new toys.

Luna pushing her orange-feather-toy-onna-stick.

She drags it around for ages, sometimes pulling, sometimes pushing, and of course the stick never does what she wants it to, but she’s very determined to take it places.

I wish I could be with them always. But Misha’s got her own moments. She’s been rather vocal about her displeasure regarding food and water dishes lately, so I got her a gravity feeder and ordered a cat fountain. I’d heard it could be difficult to get older cats to accept fountains, so I had the camera handy in case she did something interesting.

At first, she was unclear on the concept of which water thingy she was supposed to drink out of.

Misha enjoying the novelty that is the water pitcher.

Eventually, I managed to wrest the pitcher away from her and fill the fountain with water. I thought she’d not be thirsty enough to continue drinking, but she decided that she must have water from this new and novel thing. So I let her drink for a bit, and then turned the fountain on.

She was utterly disgusted with me for a bit there. You could practically hear her demanding to know what this outrage was. Eventually, though, curiosity got the better of her and she circled back to it. When it didn’t splash her, she decided it was a little bit of all right, and furthermore probably something she wasn’t supposed to drink out of, so she settled in for a good long slurp.

Fountain makes kitteh happeh.

I was afraid she’d drink herself to death that first night. She loves this thing. And I have succeeded in acquiring the appropriate feeding accessories, apparently, because she’s stopped nagging me.

I’ve got another kitteh to show you, but it’ll have to wait until I have the chance to send the picture from work. My supervisor is getting a kitten, and the current owner sent a photo, and all I can say is, you’re gonna squee. Our lives are full of adorable kitties, my darlings. That much, at least, is right with the world.

Sorry. I have to side with PZ when it comes to cats. My home is infested with two of the wretched parasites, who are unaccountably worshiped by the rest of the household. They are the bane of my existence – an expensive and destructive source of daily irritation.

And dogs? Don’t get me started, but at least I don’t have to live with one.